On Broadway: Skull Beneath the Skin

ON BROADWAY

Some plays open windows; others open worlds. The excitement attending Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is that it is one of those rare plays able to open worlds of art, life and death. The sun of this drama is coruscating wit and laughter; its shade is melancholy death. Broadway may not see a more auspicious playwriting debut this season.

Stoppard has chosen to use Hamlet as a metaphor for existence. Through his fable he marches good Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern blindfolded. They know little of their roles and less of themselves. In fear and trembling, they jolly their way to their doom. Every man does the same, Stoppard implies, for no man can divine the purpose of existence except to know that life is uncertain and death is sure.

The play begins with the flip of a coin—an act that finds its echo later when the Player King says, “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.” Just as the play is a kind of jangled echo chamber of Hamlet, so each word, event, mood and character develops an echo. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are echoes of each other, since they perpetually confuse each other’s names. They have been summoned to Elsinore by Claudius, or by fate, and they seem to be dawdling apprehensively on the way.

They kill the time with intellectual vaudeville—puns, word games, syllogistic oneupmanship. As they do so, it becomes apparent that Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett’s dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard’s lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.’s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate at flunking in life. R.: What’s the matter with you today? G.: When? R.: What? G.: Are you deaf? R.: Am I dead? G.: Yes or no? R.: Is there a choice? G.: Is there a God? R.: Foul! No non sequiturs, three-two, one game all. The game at Elsinore is more ominous. Seen through Hamlet’s eyes, which is the angle of vision Shakespeare has imposed on Hamlet, the play has a purpose. But seen through the eyes of R. and G., Elsinore is a maze of cross-purposes and Hamlet is a Mad Hatter. They smell the death and disaster around them and wistfully hope to escape, but where to? The court of Denmark has given them the only identities they have ever had—roles.

Death is the theme of the play, and it could be said of Stoppard as Eliot said of another dramatist:

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.

R. and G. feel that their existence is a cheat: “To be told so little to such an end—and still—finally—to be denied an explanation.” Here and elsewhere, Stoppard comes perilously close to singing the self-pity blues, or life-is-a-dirty-trick. All men and women submit to fate, but they are not all Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns.

Tom Stoppard, 30, rather thinks they are: “Almost everybody thinks of himself as nobody. A cipher, not even a cog. In that sense, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are everybody. I feel that I am like that.” A sense of dislocation and exile comes naturally to him. The son of a Czech doctor, Tom Stoppard was born Tom Straussler. The family moved to Singapore when he was two and his father was killed in World War II. Tom went to school and lived in Darjeeling, Calcutta, Delhi and Lahore before coming to England at the age of nine and taking his stepfather’s name. His first full-length play was aired over British television three days after President Kennedy’s assassination. “It wasn’t,” he says, “the greatest week to have a comedy on.”

Stoppard hugely enjoys honing language to the precision point. Nonetheless, a play that rides on words as heavily as does R. and G. ought to have rid itself of some. Even the tensile strength of Derek Goldby’s direction cannot keep segments of the drama from dialogyness. There is nothing logy about Brian Murray and John Wood in the taxing title roles. Every shifting breeze of the play’s moods crosses their faces: they can summon up anxiety, false courage, utter bafflement, and honest fear with a flick of the lip, or a twist of the torso. They give the play’s mind a body, and make R. and G. an evening for the playgoer who seeks not to forget but to know himself.